Accepted, but not Published

Academicians or researchers list their publications prominently on their home pages. After all, it is supposed to represent the best of their work. They also quite often (especially those who have a large number of publications) categorize them according to some criteria like the venue (workshop, conference, journal or book: in the reverse order of prominence) or peer review (unrefereed and refereed).

In this post we propose that there should be a new category of publications. This category is needed because a lot of researchers (for good or for bad) now come from underprivileged countries. For most of these researchers, traveling abroad to attend a conference, even if their paper has been accepted, is something very hard to do. In some sense even more than getting a paper accepted, which is relatively harder too, given the lack of certain privileges — whether you like the word or not — generous research grants, infrastructure, language resources etc., combined with the prejudice (it is there: I am not inventing it, whoever might be blamed for it). To these problems can be added the problem of compulsory attendance at a conference or a workshop. It is partly these conditions which have prompted suggestions from certain quarters that researchers from these countries should concentrate on journal papers (never mind the delay and difficulties involved or the unfairness of the proposition, even though it has some practical justification).

But you can never be sure while submitting that you certainly won’t be able to attend. Also, hope is said to be a good thing. Therefore, the event of a researcher submitting a paper and hoping to attend but not being able to attend cannot be ruled out.

This bring us to the proposal mentioned earlier. One solution to this problem is that there should be another category of papers: accepted but not published, because the author couldn’t afford to attend the conference or the workshop. (By the way, workshops are the most happening places nowadays: more on that later).

The author of this post must know because he has authored more than one such publications.

Of course, the condition will be that if and when such a paper is resubmitted (with or without modifications, but without any substantial new work), accepted again and finally published, the entry marked as ‘accepted’ should be removed and replaced by an entry marked as ‘published’.

After all, if we are serious about research, then the work (which has been peer reviewed and accepted) should be given somewhat more importance than some pages printed in some proceedings (or attendance in a conference for that matter).

This, of course, doesn’t mean that you can get basically the same thing published (or accepted) in more than one places.

(Sorry for the Gory Details)

P.S.: May be there is no need for the above apology as the depiction of the Gory Details of the Indian Reality is now getting multiple Oscars (The Academy Awards: the keyword is Academy). But may be there is because some researchers have a more (metaphorically) delicate constitution which can be hurt by the Gory Details.